Abstract

Many intangible cultural heritage (ICH) practices survive only when new community members adopt them, so heritage vitality can be treated as a population-level behavioural transmission process. This study develops a quantitative cultural-transmission framework for ASEAN ICH revitalization through traditional knowledge commercialization. Adapting the Abrams–Strogatz language-competition model, the fraction of a community practicing a tradition changes through adoption and abandonment, governed by a rate constant, a frequency-dependence exponent, and the perceived value of the practice. We derive all equilibria and show that, when the exponent exceeds one, full loss and full retention are locally stable and separated by an unstable interior threshold. Closed-form sensitivity results show that this threshold falls as perceived value rises and does not depend on the rate constant. Numerical simulations of illustrative theoretical scenarios confirm these results. The model was then calibrated with official Singapore census data on Chinese dialects as the main home language, whose share fell from 39.6% in 1990 to 8.7% in 2020. The decline followed a nearly constant per-capita loss rate, consistent with the linearized dynamics at the loss equilibrium (−0.0506 per year; R² > 0.999; hold-out error for 2020: 0.11 percentage points), and the nonlinear fit placed perceived value at its lower bound. Qualitative comparative analysis of ASEAN and Chinese policies and cases links commercialization, social cohesion, and cultural diplomacy to the value parameter, and a composite index is proposed for future measurement. Raising the perceived value of heritage practices therefore appears to be a key lever for sustaining them.